I Made a Thing

Yep, my time out in the blogging wilderness wasn't completely unproductive. I have spent the past month or so working on a website - http://www.hardwarereviewdatabase.com. It is of course super nerdy, but I'm hoping with a bit more development (very early stages right now) it might become something that will result in a little bit of income.

I need to start writing in here again (and fire up my monthly portrait taking once more), so I'll try and make sure I let you know how it all goes.

Yes.. we've all heard that one before (stop giving me that look).

Self Portrait - November 2011

I still feel that my self portraits are improving as I take more. They have gradually evolved from black and white on a black background, through to colour on a black background, and then coloured backgrounds for the last couple.

I still need to learn a bit more about lighting, but I'm going to need some more lights for that.

Pumpkin Carving

People in the UK generally don't go as crazy as Americans do for halloween. I usually don't get a pumpkin to carve, but thought I would this year. A pretty typical face, but it turned out OK.

Prepare for a change..

I feel that a redesign around here may be imminent (which, considering it is me saying that, probably means within the next month or so).

If you have suggestions, I'll happily take (and largely ignore) them.

Self Portrait - October 2011

Thinking I should do a "spooky" portrait for Halloween at the end of the month too. It will depend if I end up dressing up or can be bothered gruesifying myself in photoshop.

Things I have been doing recently

Well, intentions outlined in my previous post haven't been followed up on very well have they. I also have this strange aversion to writing anything here when I know there has been a long gap. The longer the gap is, the more pressure there is to write something and therefore the less I feel like doing anything about it. Note that this is a common pattern of behaviour and that should you ever wish to get me to do something that continual pressure probably isn't the best way to do it. I'd like to say I have been so busy over the last month or so (ok, nearly two months) that I just haven't had the time to write. That would of course be a lie.

With the deadline to my list of goals ending in the previous post, I have since realised how useful it was as motivation for applying myself to certain tasks. You may have noticed (or not) that there wasn't even a self portrait last month, despite me considering it worthy enough to continue doing after the deadline passed. I'll try and make that a one off (well at least until I make a decision to stop doing it rather than it just lapsing). For reasons of motivation then, I'm going to get my next 101 list completed as soon as I can. With my birthday coming up, it'll be a list that takes me most of the way to 30, which is slightly scary number.

One thing I have been doing with my time recently (apart from applying for jobs and hearing very little back.. but we'll skip that) is working on a website project for a friend. It's the first site based on an ecommerce platform that I have worked on, so I have learned quite a bit along the way. The site itself is for his company, Inox Fasteners, which sells stainless steel fasteners for motorcycles. It may not sound like the most exciting subject matter, but I am pretty happy with how the site has come out visually and functionally. I'll be interested to see if it helps his business (which is the main goal after all). It also gives me a itch to start twiddling around with the template for this blog as well, so I might get stuck into that soon and give things a bit of a refresh.

101 Things in 1001 Days Deadline is Over

Yep, last night was the deadline date for my 101 Things in 1001 Days List. I have gone over the list and marked off all of the items I managed to complete and those that I failed. I have also left some of the goals marked in orange, as I felt it would be better to highlight them not as abject failures, but as attempts (some more successful than others it has to be said).

Over the next week or two I will be breaking it down and talking about some of the goals in more detail and what I have got out of the whole process. It has certainly been a positive, even if I have come away at the end of it with less than half of the total completed.

By this time next month I should have a new list started, hopefully learning some lessons about goal setting from last time around. Who knew that three years would end up feeling like such a short period of time.

I'm Back!

I suspect you didn't even notice I was gone, as this fits pretty much into my usual update schedule now. Either way, my internet connection was severed over the weekend due to an engineer (I assume) from the phone company fiddling around and managing to swap our line with someone else's. That meant a different number for a few days and a dead internet connection (it's ADSL and unsurprisingly doesn't work if it isn't plugged into the right place).

It also happens to be less the 24hrs until my list deadline hits. I can't imagine getting a whole lot more done on it in that time, but a bit of rushed flailing might push one or tow goals over the edge.

The boredom of no internet connection for a few days did mean that I got around to watching all three seasons of Arrested Development (which I'd been meaning to do for a while). If you aren't familiar with it, I suggest you schedule some eye ball time and sit and enjoy. You will thank me.